Rencontre avec Aaron Shurin

Inter­view with Aaron Shurin

Poet Aaron Shurin lives in San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia, and is the author of over a dozen books, both poet­ry and essay col­lec­tions. He cofound­ed the Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts-based writ­ing col­lec­tive Good Gay Poets, and was the direc­tor of the Mas­ter of Fine Arts in Writ­ing pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Francisco.

Shurin’s newest book is Cit­i­zen (City Lights Books, 2012). The poems in this col­lec­tion start­ed as a response to a Mar­tin Puryear sculp­ture exhib­it at the San Fran­cis­co Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. Shurin explained, “I start­ed writ­ing down words that I saw as his mate­ri­als, from the muse­um tags describ­ing the pieces. It could be wagon—there was a wag­on, cedar—which the wag­on was made of, yellow—the col­or some­thing was paint­ed.… I felt like for this show, that my response was that I would write poems using the same mate­ri­als that he used, except that my mate­ri­als were the words of his mate­ri­als.” To get a feel for how Shurin turned his notes into poems, lis­ten to Shurin read “Glo­ria Mun­di” from Cit­i­zen here:

http://w3sidecar.tumblr.com/private/46441808566/tumblr_mkc51sjUlO1rb5twt.

In the fol­low­ing ques­tion and answer set, Shurin elab­o­rates on the struc­ture of his new book, what read­ers might take away from Cit­i­zen, and his thoughts on the writ­ing life.

Do you have a phi­los­o­phy for why you write?

Poet­ry is atten­tion, and it is the means of attend­ing expe­ri­ence. Atten­tion is the key word both for what it requires and what its nature is.

How does the struc­ture of a piece influ­ence your work? What’s the rela­tion­ship between con­tent and form?

Struc­ture is just process, it is the way that I com­pose. Because top­i­cal­ly Cit­i­zen is about any­thing, I want­ed it to have coher­ence. I thread­ed it with a few oper­a­tive struc­tur­al ele­ments to give it a sense of uni­ty, rather than being a ran­dom collection.

There are con­trib­u­to­ry fig­u­ra­tive ele­ments that are dynam­ic in Cit­i­zen—the con­stant restate­ment and its inces­sant use of dash­es and ellipses. I want­ed there to be a sense that lan­guage was shim­mer­ing, which is to say it could always be restat­ed. Lan­guage was nev­er per­ma­nent and that kept the world in flux, and per­haps more lifelike.

I’m also con­stant­ly propos­ing lit­tle col­lid­ed pairs of words that re-shift the focus, and restate the shift. It was easy to col­lide words in unusu­al pair­ings, lit­tle “scin­tilles,” to use the French word that describes the sparkles from fire­works. The pairs are lit­tle scin­til­la­tions that erupt in the mid­dle of the poem as it shifts.

There are about half a dozen things that were simul­ta­ne­ous the­mat­ic or struc­tur­al coher­ing points in Cit­i­zen. The first was the process, the sec­ond was the use of ellipses and dash­es, the third was these col­lid­ing pairs of scin­til­la­tions. Then there were the the­mat­ic phras­es that appeared: “Per­haps it is,” “It is or it isn’t,” “It may well be.” Those become motifs, as does “Once I was,” and then there a num­ber of poems about the sky. I didn’t start out with all of those, but did attend them. As some came up, I real­ized that I want­ed them to reap­pear. “The beau­ti­ful nights dance like bears,” comes up, and it is actu­al­ly stolen from a poem of mine from a book writ­ten almost twen­ty years ago.

What do you hope read­ers will take away from Cit­i­zen?

I hope they take extreme plea­sure in the sen­su­al and intel­lec­tu­al syn­the­sis of lan­guage at play. I’m not sure I can say much beyond that.

Well, I’ll tell you a lit­tle bit more about the back­ground of Cit­i­zen. There were sev­er­al threads with­in the book, and one was the struc­tur­al one I just described. Anoth­er was that I want­ed it to be per­me­able to the world, as nar­ra­tive is inclined toward the world. I was trav­el­ing a bunch, most­ly to Mex­i­co and some to Ari­zona, and so I made the deci­sion to let the sights, sounds, arti­facts, and expe­ri­ences of my trav­els come through. As for what peo­ple take away, every­thing that I put in, I wish for them to get—the meet­ing point of the imag­i­na­tion and the world.

One of the things that I talked about with my pub­lish­er is the title, and it has occa­sion­al­ly giv­en some read­ers trou­ble. Some peo­ple had pre-formed ideas of what a book called Cit­i­zen should be in this cli­mate. In my view, Cit­i­zen had mul­ti­ple lay­ers. It was also sit­u­at­ing myself as a cit­i­zen of the imag­i­na­tion, which seems to me the pri­ma­ry locus of poet­ry, and also as the cov­er sug­gests, that I am a cit­i­zen of the book, of the lan­guage of poet­ry. I would love for all of those lay­ers to be active for readers.

What do you find most chal­leng­ing about writing? 

Chal­leng­ing in the sense that one wants a chal­lenge? So, what is that: the art.

What’s the best advice you’ve been giv­en as a writer?

The best advice I was giv­en as a writer was not ver­bal, but mod­el­ing. I had the great for­tune of hav­ing stu­pen­dous friend/teacher mod­els: Robert Dun­can, Denise Lev­er­tov, Diane di Pri­ma. It was their prac­tice that is the best advice that was ever giv­en to me. Their com­bined author­i­ty and fig­ure of how to live a life as a poet was the rich­est infor­ma­tion that could have been depart­ed to me. It was a touch­stone all my younger years. To have them as mod­els both for teach­ing and for writ­ing, mod­els of poet­ic integrity—that meant everything.

About Aaron Shurin

Poet and essay­ist Aaron Shurin was born in Man­hat­tan, New York, and grew up there, in east­ern Texas, and in Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia. He earned a BA at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, where he stud­ied with poet Denise Lev­er­tov, and an MA in Poet­ics at the New Col­lege of Cal­i­for­nia. Influ­enced by Robert Dun­can and Frank O’Hara, Shurin com­pos­es lyric poems that explore themes of sex­u­al­i­ty and loss. 

Shurin is the author of more than a dozen books, includ­ing the poet­ry col­lec­tions The Par­adise of Forms: Select­ed Poems (1999), a Pub­lish­ers Week­ly Best Book; Invol­un­tary Lyrics (2005); and A’s Dream (1989), as well as the essay col­lec­tions King of Shad­ows (2008) and Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997). Shurin has won fel­low­ships from the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Ger­bode Foun­da­tion, the San Fran­cis­co Arts Com­mis­sion, and the Cal­i­for­nia Arts Coun­cil. He cofound­ed the Boston-based writ­ing col­lec­tive Good Gay Poets and was the direc­tor of the MFA pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Francisco. 

(Biog­ra­phy source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/aaron-shurin.)